The mystery of Easter Island : the story of an expedition

CHAPTER IV

The River Plate—*-Buenos Aires, Its Trade and People

The Argentine Republic is the modern representative of the
Spanish colonies on the east; coast of South America, as Brazil is that
of the Portuguese, Fifteen years after the landing of Cabral, Spanish
sailors first sighted the entrance, to the Rio Plata, and in 1535
Mendoza established a settlement; on the site which later was Buenos
Aires. No gold or silver, however, was to be found, and the Spani-
ards looked on their holdings on the South Atlantic merely as a back
door to their richer possessions on the Pacific. Till the eighteenth
century all their South American territories were under the Viceroy
of Peru, and in order to suit the convenience of that colony no ship
was allowed to trade direct with Buenos Aires ; all the merchandise
from Europe had to be fetched over the Andes. It was not till the
first richness of the mines was exhausted that attention was draw
to the grass-covered plains of the east,

The Napoleonic wars, which turned Brazil from a colony to an
empire, ultimately led to the establishment of republican rule in
the Spanish colonies. Pitt, however, made a mistake in judging in
1806 that the discontent felt by the younger nation with the rule of
their mother-country would make them unite in the war against her,
He sent an armed force to the River Plate, but his full expectation
that there would be a local rising was grievously disappointed;
Buenos Aires was captured, but the British were subsequently

heavily defeated and obliged to return homft. v*» *«-*"~------*

the " reconon^cf " *~ — *

'S " tUese ^ereuc ^tweei1 the two

t the beginning of this